Co-founder and CEO of Amity here. Thanks @chrismessina for hunting us!
Today, we're excited to launch Amity Communities, and share it with the Product Hunt community.
Amity is a live communities platform that allows people around the world to come together to discover and discuss trending topics, breaking news, and live events — in real-time, for free.
Join any community instantly or create your own in 60 seconds.
We created Amity to give community creators back the power and control they’ve been waiting for.
If you want to create an Amity community:
1. Download the app: https://amity.io/download
2. Create a community (claim your link)
3. Customize your community (choose live chat, posts, or both)
4. Share your link or QR code on social and with friends
5. Start interacting with live chat, posts, and comment threads.
6. Add countdown timers.
7. Pin posts and send push notifications to all your members anytime.
P.S. Here's a Medium article on the story of Amity Communities:
https://medium.com/@amityapp/int...

Congrats on the launch, looks interesting indeed. Besides the obvious Privacy concerns, what's the benefit of using Amity over Facebook Groups? Would love to be convinced that it can bring the same/better engagement levels!
Cheers!

Thanks @irhymeth! It's all real-time.
You can customize your community — choose live chat only, posts only, or both.
You can add customizations, like countdown timers, to the top of your community.
If you're a community admin, you can pin posts and send a push notification to reach your entire audience anytime you want. This helps solve some of the fundamental reach problems people are having on traditional social networks like Facebook.

@johnnychengx Thanks for the response. While all those sound like awesome features, as far as engagement is concerned, do you think an Amity community will be able to drive the kind of engagement a Facebook group does. The biggest advantage of a group is that people need not download an app or sign up to a new service to join a community. How does Amity plan to combat that issue? I'd love to understand if Amity can become a replacement for Facebook communities as I spend a lot of time on those and the value is tremendous.

@irhymeth I think FB groups will have their place and will be good for the use cases it's made for. Amity doesn't need to replace everything. We'll look to be great for real-time events, live sports, content creators, trending discussions etc — and for those who want a new platform, a fresh start.